Clay Bright, Tennessee Commissioner of Transportation v. William Harold Thomas, Jr.

The federal Highway Beautification Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-285, § 101, 79 Stat. 1028, 1028 (“HBA”), requires States to maintain “effective control” of outdoor advertising on property near certain federally funded highways, or else risk losing ten percent of their federal highway funding. 23 U.S.C. § 131(b). To maintain “effective control,” States must generally prohibit signs on highway-adjacent areas, subject to limited exceptions. See id. § 131(c)-(d). The categories of excepted signs that States may allow include “onpremises” signs—those advertising “the sale or lease of property upon which [the sign is] located” or “activities conducted on [that] property.” Id. § 131(c). To ensure that they receive full federal highway funding, all fifty States have enacted laws to regulate outdoor advertising on highway-adjacent areas, and nearly all those laws include exceptions for on-premises signs that mirror the exception in the HBA. Countless municipal sign codes also distinguish between onpremises and off-premises signs. In the decision below, the Sixth Circuit held that the on-premises exception in Tennessee’s decades-old Billboard Regulation and Control Act, 1972 Tenn. Pub. Acts, ch. 655, violates the First Amendment as applied to noncommercial speech. The question presented is: Whether a sign regulation containing an exception for on-premises signs, for which both commercial and noncommercial speech may qualify, violates the First Amendment under this Court’s decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 135 S. Ct. 2218 (2015).